Renny (The Henchmen MC #6)

by Jessica Gadziala

  "Do I blow hot and cold?"

  "What?" he asked, slowly pulling back slightly, eyes landing on mine.

  "Cyrus said we're weird together because we both blow so hot and cold."

  "Cyrus is an idiot."

  "Cyrus is an objective third party," I countered.

  "Alright, fine. He's not an idiot," he conceded.

  "You didn't answer my question."

  He sighed a little. "Fine. You pretend to be cold. I think the longer you're stuck around the same group of people, the harder it is for you to keep up that pretense. So you warm up. And that makes you seem hot and cold. Happy?"

  It wasn't exactly the kind of news that made you happy. As much as I had absolutely worked to become cooler, more detached, guarded, it hurt in a strange way to be called on that. It shouldn't have. Logically, it should have made me happy. Maybe if I wasn't post-orgasm contented and Renny's fingers weren't still inside me, I could have found the determination to be that woman I had worked to be my whole life.

  "No," I admitted, looking into his eyes and seeing understanding there.

  "You like pretending to be cool, Mina," he said, his fingers sliding out of me then out of my panties to settle on the material covering my ass. "But I see underneath the ice. It's not as thick as you want it to seem. Just a small puddle really. Bet you I can melt it without much effort."

  I had a sneaking suspicion that he would win that bet. I had just been in a bed with him for a couple hours and I was pretty sure I was already thawing.

  "That scare you?" he asked, his hand behind my neck moving down to whisper across my shoulders.

  I took a breath and gave him the truth. "It would scare me less if I knew you well enough to trust you."

  His face went just a little guarded at that. "What do you want to know?"

  "Everything," I said honestly. "I want to know everything. I mean... I know you have had something dark happen in your life and I understand that it might not be..."

  "You gonna shut it so I can tell you everything or what?" he asked, lips tipping up at one corner, but the motion didn't make it to his eyes.

  "What?"

  "Well, if you want to know all my dark and twisted, doodle-bug, you need to hush so I can give it to you."

  "Doodle-bug?" I objected with a snort.

  "You like it," he said, ducking his head a little. "In fact, you like all the pet names. You just don't want to admit it, snuggle-puss."

  I laughed at that, shaking my head at him.

  "Alright, I'll shut up. Give it to me."

  Then he gave it to me.

  TEN

  Renny

  No one got everything.

  Everyone who needed to, got bits and pieces, got the Cliffsnotes version. That meant the guys in the club had a generalized idea of what I came from and what motivated me to be a dick at times. But they didn't get the ugly details.

  Some things weren't meant for sharing.

  But the fact of the matter was, shit changed in that kitchen a few hours before. Why? I wasn't sure. But after the argument with Mina, I had felt remorse for my usual dickishness.

  I never felt remorse for it before.

  I figured maybe that was a sign. What it was a sign of was a bit foggy, but as I thought shit through, I came to the conclusion that, at the very least, it was a sign to dig deeper into it.

  But Mina had trust issues and if I wanted more from her, I had to give her more from me.

  "My parents were always brilliant," I started, holding her tighter when she went to pull away, to put space between us. But that was the last goddamn thing I needed. As a whole, I tried to not even think about my upbringing, let alone dissect it. But it was time. "So much so that they were cold and clinical in their outlook on life, in their interactions with everyone. Scientists to the core, in a way."

  "Smart, hm?" she asked. "You fell way, way far from that tree, huh?" she teased and I know she was just trying to lighten my mood.

  I was smart as fuck and she knew it.

  "They didn't believe in things like guilt and love and affection. How the fuck I was even conceived is a goddamn mystery. I half believe it involved test tubes because there's no way those two fucked. Anyway, I think the purpose of having me was purely clinical."

  "They wanted to test different parenting theories on you," she guessed.

  "In a way, yes. The problem was, they wanted to test them fucking all on me. Had they maybe tried some attachment parenting or French-style parenting on me and stuck with the method, maybe I wouldn't have gotten as fucked in the head as I did. But one night as a baby, I was made to cry it out and self-soothe. The next, I was coddled. The next, crying it out again. Then as I got older, they would test out the Marshmallow Experiment on me- see if I was a kid more into instant gratification with a small reward or one with self-restraint who could wait for the bigger payout later."

  "Which were you?"

  "I'd still take the mother fucking marshmallow now over the cookie later," I admitted with a humorless smile.

  "What else?" she prompted when I went silent.

  I shrugged. "They tested out negative reinforcement over positive. I was apparently more receptive to negative because that was the one they stuck with. There was hardly a day when I wasn't 'naughty', 'silly', 'bad', or 'stupid'. There was no malice in their words, mind you. They weren't programmed that way. They just knew that when they called me stupid, I worked harder. And when they called me bad, I cleaned up my mess or settled down. So when I did something bad, I got belittled, but when I did something good, figured out some kind of puzzle they threw at me, I got whatever small little token of approval they were capable of."

  "What about as you got older?"

  "That's where they had more fun with me in a way. I didn't play Monopoly or Life. My games were more like 'that man in the red hat is a bad guy, tell me why' variety. I was observant by nature and they worked to exploit that. I was taught to make snap judgements, to create chains out of small links. If I couldn't figure out why the half moon cuts on his forearms meant that he was a rapist, then there would be bare walls and cold floors in my future. I learned quick to not miss anything."

  "You said they never hit you," she started, slipping slightly into profiler mode which I would normally find sexy, but in that moment, with her magnifying glass focused on me, I only found it unsettling.

  "No hitting."

  "But it wasn't just psychological, right?"

  "For the most part, yes. But there was some EST in my teens when I was becoming 'defiant'. Really, I was just able to see how fucked up it was that I wasn't allowed to have a TV, video games, music, or toys."

  "You weren't allowed to have toys?"

  "They figured I would learn to entertain myself better if I had to find ways to amuse myself. I had a lot of pet potato bugs," I said with a head shake.

  "So... nothing? Not even simple wooden toys?"

  "Do matchsticks count? I used to built fucking cities out of those things."

  "Did you have friends?"

  "We lived out in the boonies and most of the kids were put off by how I would analyze everything they did or tell them how I knew they had hotdogs for lunch because of the grease stain on their pants and the mustard on their cheek. As if the red hair wasn't bad enough, I was a freak."

  "Were you always prone to the... ah... flipswitch thing? When you go dark and obsessive?"

  "My father was a flip-switcher when he couldn't figure something out. It was night and day when things were going well versus when things were being more complicated than he felt they should be. Because, you know, humans aren't rational and predictable like he liked them. He was a bear for a week once when some agoraphobic patient of his wouldn't respond to exposure therapy. That was the week he decided to cure me of my fear of bears."

  "By?" she asked, tone guarded, likely knowing she wasn't going to like what was to follow.

  "By chaining me to a tree like a fucking dog all night," I recalled, rememberi
ng how sick I had been. Literally sick with fear. I vomited over and over until there was nothing left to throw up. Then, terrified the meat I had from dinner, even regurgitated, might be appealing to the bears, I had dug a hole in the half-frozen ground with my bare hands and buried the sick.

  "How old were you?"

  "Seven? I think. Hard to tell. Somewhere around then. Fucking crazy thing was- it wasn't some irrational fear. We had bears. I could wake up most mornings to see one out back. But he was in a mood about the patient he couldn't fix so he figured he'd fix me."

  "Did he?"

  "Do I seem fixed, baby?" I asked. "I mean, I wasn't mauled to death that night and it wasn't as big a concern after that. But I became obsessed with phobias and motivators after that. It wasn't good enough if some kid told me he was afraid of the dark. I needed to know what he thought was in the dark to be afraid of and then I needed to know where he got the idea of what was in the dark. Eventually, somewhere in my teens, I became a lot more like him. When I couldn't figure something out, be it school work or some study I was doing on someone without them knowing, I would shut down and get either cold or cruel, I would become obsessed with stabbing my fingers in the wounds to see if they squealed."

  "Why does Duke's past bother you so much?"

  "Duke's past doesn't bother me, aside from being disgusted that skinheads still exist. It interests me that he has so much guilt about it when it was beyond his control. I wanted to see what kind of power his family still had over him. I wanted to know if his motivator was obligation."

  "Was it?"

  "It was shame," I said, shaking my head. "He's so fucking convinced that he's covered in scum because of them that it is hard for him to accept that he deserves more than to be covered in shit the rest of his life."

  "What is your motivator?" she pressed.

  "Good question," I said, shrugging. "Fuck if I know. I'm too all over the place to figure mine out."

  "Why did you run away?" she asked.

  "Raising Renny," I supplied.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Raising Renny," I repeated. "When I was seventeen, they brought me down to their office in the basement where they had stacks of paper laid across the table. Seventeen of them."

  She nodded them, understanding. "One for each year of your life."

  "Exactly. Had they maybe not been batshit fucking crazy, it wouldn't have been so unsettling. But they chronicled everything. How many times I wet the bed and what that said about my mental capacities. What my nightmares were. When, how often, and speculations on why I started getting hard-ons around eleven. The embarrassing and fumbling stories of my first crush. I sat there and read it from first to last page, finding they somehow knew about how I lost my virginity and what it said about me that I chose the girl I chose to do that with. I flipped shit."

  "Understandably," she said, turning her head slightly to plant a kiss on my shoulder.

  "I crashed the computer and I burned the pages. I told them exactly how fucked up I thought they were."

  "What did they do?"

  "They sat there and wrote down fucking notes. And seeing that, seeing that no matter what I did or said, it would never elicit any kind of genuine reaction out of them, that there would be no changing them, I left."

  "You couldn't have had much..."

  "I didn't have shit. Not even a change of clothes. I grabbed their car keys and hit the road. Didn't stop driving until I hit here."

  "And?"

  "And I kicked around town for a few years. I drank, I fucked, I got into a shitload of fucking fights. I was young and mad at the world and couldn't turn off my foot-in-mouth tendencies. It never even occurred to me to not tell a girl that her boyfriend was clearly cheating on her. Or tell some random guy that his repressed homosexual drive was making him a bully."

  "You never did learn, huh?" she teased.

  "Nah. I just found people who didn't mind it so much. And people who found it useful. Reign likes me tagging along and telling him why the Russians are refusing to do business all a sudden or what is motivating the Mexicans to demand the guns for half the price."

  "Or tell him why the new probates should or shouldn't be in the MC."

  "Exactly."

  "Have you ever tried to talk to someone about it?"

  "I'm talking to you."

  "I meant a professional."

  "You know as much as any shrink. Analyze me, Doc."

  She considered me a for a long moment, those fucking amazing eyes of hers a little sad. "Fear of failure and need of approval."

  "What?" I asked.

  "Your motivators. You have a fear of failure and a need of approval. Like it or not, that's why you do what you do. If you didn't do this, if you didn't read people and poke and prod at them, what would you have to feel pride about? What do you bring to the table?"

  "You mean aside from my devilish good looks and world-class pussy-eating abilities?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood, uncomfortable that she was maybe uncovering something I didn't want to know about myself.

  She laughed at that, looking away for a second. "Yes, aside from that."

  She was right.

  I didn't have much to bring to the table outside of my small subset of skills. I was a decent shot. I was cool under pressure, as I should have been having grown up in a pressure cooker. But I wasn't a practical sniper like Repo. I didn't have Reign's experience. I didn't have brute force like Wolf or training like Duke.

  "See, I think you dig and you poke at sore spots because you can, in a way, bring the rat home to your owner and get a pat on the head. And you are afraid that, if you stop bringing home the rats, even if your owner is getting kind of sick of cleaning up the bodies, that you will in some way have failed." She paused there for a second. "The thing is, you belong here now, Renny. You don't have to work at this so hard."

  "Easier said than done, lamb chop. It comes and goes as it comes and goes."

  "Have you ever maybe just... tried though?"

  "Tried what? Tried not being myself?"

  "I'm not saying to not be yourself. I'm not even saying to stop analyzing people because, in some ways, it can be a good skill. But try to stop from going so dark and cold. You're not a victim of your impulses, Renny. You're supposed to be the master of them."

  She wasn't wrong.

  I usually just went with it, got obsessed with it, when there was something I wanted to figure out or a reaction I wanted to try to bring about. I had convinced myself it was for the greater good of the MC to dig up everyone's skeletons, to dust them off, to dangle them in front of their faces and see how they spooked.

  And, in some situations, like vetting the prospects, it was useful. I would even go ahead and defend the first incident with Duke. Was it shitty? Sure. But did I get to see that his loyalty was squarely set where it belonged? Yes.

  But it didn't need to be a continuing cycle. If you kept jabbing your finger into a healing bruise, it would never go away.

  I was, in some situations, causing more harm than good.

  That being said, it was so ingrained, it was such a part of my life from such a young age, I wasn't entirely sure it would be something I could always control. If the impulse was small, just a curiosity that could go rogue and become an obsession, yeah, I probably could hold off and think clearly about it. But if it was one of the situations when I went zero to one-hundred in a blink... I didn't think I possessed enough restraint to handle that.

  But she was right; I could fucking try.

  That shit in the kitchen earlier, that could have been avoided. It was jealousy gone rogue.

  I had been working my long game on Mina for months, tried every goddamn thing I could think of to try to get her to take a chance on me. But she had pushed me away at every opportunity.

  Then in walked Lazarus.

  And, see, I was secure enough to call the man what he was- he was fucking good looking. He was the bastard most heroes are written to look like- tall, dark, handsome,
and just dangerous enough.

  He didn't even need to flirt with her and she was standing in that kitchen, working side-by-side with him when she had always done everything she could to keep space between us, and she told him shit. It wasn't epic, life-changing shit, but it was pieces to the puzzle. She told him about how much she hated Dutch food, much to her father's never-ending amazement. She told him that of all the places she saw as a kid, there was nothing like Russia. She liked the architecture. She thought it looked like it was out of a storybook. She told him a silly story about the one time Lo made her pitch in making dinner at Hailstorm once and she managed to screw up minute rice.

  I lashed out at Laz because it was easier.

  Then I accused her of not doing her job because I knew it would get a rise out of her. I hadn't expected, though, that she would call me on my bullshit, that she wouldn't rise to the bait and defend herself, but attack me instead. And the craziest fucking thing happened while she ranted and raved- the switch flipped off all on its own.

  And I felt bad about it having been on in the first place.

  That was new for me.

  A 'breakthrough' as my parents would have called it.

  I was curious to see if it was something that could happen regularly with anyone, or if it only worked because it was her, because she just intrinsically got it, because she wasn't the type to take offense to it or back down from putting me in my place.

  I wasn't going to get my hopes up too high. After twenty-someodd years, I didn't see myself changing much. But anything was possible I guess.

  I could, as she suggested, try.

  "Hey Renny," she said, voice sweet, sweeter than I was used to hearing it, sweet as it sounded when my fingers were inside her and she was whimpering and crying out.

  "Yeah, sweetheart?" I asked, looking back at her to find her lips slightly parted, her eyes a little heavy-lidded.

  "I think maybe I know enough to trust you now," she declared, voice still smaller than usual.

  "Yeah?" I asked, knowing what that meant. It didn't just mean she was going to stop keeping me at a distance. It didn't only mean, either, that she was going to give me a chance to prove myself.